BURNLEY stand to make £2million over the next five years from a new corporate initiative ready to launch at Turf Moor next month.

The ‘Premier Club’, aimed at small businesses, is the latest venture the Clarets have come up with as they plan ahead for when the UEFA Financial Fairplay Ruling comes in to force in 2013.

Championship clubs and the rest of the Football League will be penalised for failing to at least break even, while players’ salaries will be capped at around 60 per cent of turnover.

And Burnley are taking steps now to keep them competitive in an increasingly tough environment by becoming the first club with an existing stadium to make ‘club seats’ available in the Jimmy McIlroy lower tier.

At the moment, just three per cent of the Clarets’ turnover comes from corporate hospitality, which is six per cent below the Championship average.

The launch of the Premier Club, which features 400 premium seats, is set to double what they now make, and will improve when stadium development plans, which were set back by the recession, are given the go-ahead in the future.

The initiative involves individual seats being sold as property for either £500 for five years or £1000 for the life of the stadium. Additional monthly payments of £59 for a ‘gold’ seat or £75 for a ‘platinum’ seat - plus VAT - are then made to the club and entitle the owner to entry into any game or event at Turf Moor.

Similar schemes have proved successful at Brighton and Hove Albion’s new American Express Community Stadium, where the corporate membership increased from 113 to just under 3,000, generating £16million for the club over the next five years.

Ken Sharp, who oversaw the Club Seat Membership for the Seagulls and seven other football clubs in the UK, has now been drafted in by Burnley on a consultancy basis as the project manager, bringing with him 12 years’ experience in the field. And he is confident the scheme can be successful for the Clarets, after selling 10 per cent of their 400-seat allocation after just three presentations to existing corporate customers.

“This is the first club in the country to adopt the ‘Club Seat’ model in an existing stadium,” said the Australian, who started out at Melbourne’s 55,000 seater Colonial Stadium, where 100 million Australian dollars was raised through Business Club Seat Membership.

“The Jimmy McIlroy Stand was built 11 years ago, the International Suite space was built five years ago, but this season it’s available for the first time for a product like this, which will launch on October 15.”

Sharp has worked on eight Football League sites in the last decade, including Hull City’s KC Stadium and Swansea City’s Liberty Stadium before both clubs were promoted to the Premier League.

“They are comparable clubs to Burnley who have enjoyed quite good success, which is so closely linked to revenue,” he continued.

“An extra 500 premium seats is like having another 1500 fans in your stand in financial terms.

“The new financial rules that are coming in are going to restrict clubs, which is why Burnley are looking and thinking forward.”